Monday, January 17, 2011

They're Not Important People!

A McDonald's worker was fired recently for letting a man in to use the bathroom after hours. Later she was given her job back after the press reported that it was NFL superstar Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings (the McDonald's was in Minnesota so the team matters, I guess). The rule was not to let people in the store after hours, she broke the rule, she got fired. That much I agree with. It's the part where she got her job back because he was a football player that bothers me.

If it was the president, or the first lady, I'd agree she should get her job back. If it was her congressman, I'd agree. If he was a uniformed police officer who rolled up in a squad car, I'd be fine with it. These are people who might outrank company policy, the people you defer to. But he was a football player! Football players are not important people! They play a game and they play it well. A game! Like Monopoly or tag. They get paid disproportionate amounts of money to play what is basically organized nationwide tag! They should not get to violate company polities at will just because they are good at a game. He's not even an Olympic star or anything. He hasn't beaten the rest of the world, just the rest of the people who wanted to play one specific position in one specific team. There are what, maybe fifty, other people out there with the same job and prestige as him. Basically, he's the vice president of a company that has fifty vice presidents. And for that he gets some woman her job back after she was fired for breaking a rule she never claimed not to break?! Because he plays self-important tag really well (but not well enough to go to the Super Bowl or anything- there are other better tag-players out there) the rules literally don't apply to him.

If you believe in quantum theory, then there are an infinite number of Earths out there which differ from ours in ways both large and small, and in some of them, a woman just got her McDonald's job back after letting a Dungeons and Dragons champion pee, as well as a dodgeball whiz, a badminton celebrity, and a star Civil War reenactor, and none of these situations is any more preposterous than the one that happened here.